Here are a few of my tips for cleaning up your blog, for Spring cleaning or Fall brush off.

Add Some Sparkle: Is something boring, dull, or needs some dusting off on your site? Add a bit of color, spice up the footer, change a background or header graphic, do something to add some spice and sparkle to fresh up the look of your site.

Clean the Dust Bunnies Off Your Links: Links to external sites die, often more frequently than you can imagine. They are left collecting dust on your site, leading visitors to nothing. Go through and test your external site links for current and update the old ones if you can.

Look for Dead Ends: While you are cleaning out dead links, take time to check your site’s statistics for 404 Page Not Found errors. If you have been messing around with permalinks or imported your site from a previous blogging or site management tool, take time to go through your internal links and look for links that lead nowhere and update them to the new link address.

Update WordPress or Your Site Software: If you are using WordPress or any other HTML or blogging tool, make sure you have the latest version or upgrade as there may be critical security patches you need.

Update Plugins: Like the rest of your software, plugins often need updating as bugs or conflicts may have been found and the plugin may have been upgraded.

Check Search Engines and Directories: It’s all nice to have started off gang-busters on search engine optimization and submissions, but have you been keeping up with the times? Do some searches for your site on various search engines and see what turns up. If it isn’t enough, consider resubmitting your site or specific pages or categories of your site to get more coverage by search engines. Tagging from Technorati and Del.icio.us and other tagging directories is hot right now. Are you getting tagged?

Lift Your Head and Look Around: When I’m really busy with my work and my life, there is a lot of clutter that builds up around me, and I tend to ignore it until it reaches the crisis state – someone comes for a visit. Lift your head up from your little busy world and take a really good look at what is going on in the web world. What is the newest, hottest, latest technology and site look? Is your site looking dated and still forced into a table based design? Is it time to make some improvements and changes? Then look around and see what other sites look like and take time to clean up your own.

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[…] However your missing links break, make it a part of your regularly scheduled blog maintenance to check for those dead links. Your users will be much happier when they click a link and it actually works. […]

[…] After the development and design, someone must maintain the site. This can be as simple as looking at it once a week to see that it is still there and working, or more intensive such as adding frequent updated information or content regularly. In general, a small site (1-10 pages) may require 2-20 hours a month to maintain properly. If designed well to begin with, a small site can be ignored for months on end, except for the occasional check-in. […]

[…] Make these tests and checks of your blog a part of your regular maintenance schedule. It’s critical to do semi-annual website maintenance to keep your blog performing well and ready for search engines to visit. […]